Anxiety statistics 2025

37.1% of women and 29.9% of men reported high levels of anxiety, and other recent anxiety facts and statistics.

Further reading: Diagnosis Symptoms Medication Anxiety test Treatment

Anxiety is a feeling of fear, worry or general unease that we all get from time to time, be it when we go for a job interview or go for our first day at school. If these feelings persist, or are so extreme that they considerably affect normal life, you could have an anxiety disorder, just like the 6% highlighted in these UK mental health statistics.

Part of understanding anxiety is educating ourselves on data and research on the topic. To help you gain that understanding of how common anxiety is, we’ve listed some relevant facts and figures from leading organisations in mental health, academia and public health.

Prevalence and demographics

In any given week in England, 6 in 100 people are diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. [1]
In 2022/23, an average of 37.1% of women and 29.9% of men reported high levels of anxiety in the UK. [2]
In 2021, individuals aged 16 to 29 years were most likely to experience some form of anxiety (28%), with prevalence decreasing steadily through older age groups. [2]
In March 2023, 20% of UK adults reported feeling anxious most or all of the time in the previous two weeks. [3]

Youth anxiety

In 2023-24, there were 204,526 new referrals of patients aged 17 or under where the primary cause was anxiety. This is more than double the rate before the pandemic began. [4]
A 2019 survey of nearly 38,000 UK students found that 21.5% had a current mental health diagnosis, and an additional 33.9% experienced serious psychological issues requiring professional help. [5]

Economic and social impact

32% of UK adults reported that being able to afford to pay bills was a significant cause of anxiety in the past two weeks. [6]
In 2022, the public sector in the UK lost 18.5 million working days due to mental health-related issues, including anxiety, marking an increase of over two million compared to 2020. [7]
The cost of poor mental health, including anxiety, is calculated at £300 billion a year in England. [8]

Treatment and support

Globally, only about 1 in 4 (27.6%) of people with an anxiety disorder receive any treatment yet only 36.9% of those suffering receive treatment [9]
In the 2022-23 period, 49.9% of referrals to NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression moved to recovery. [10]

Around the world

In 2019, anxiety disorders affected 301 million people worldwide. [11]
5.6% of people in the UK are estimated to have an anxiety disorder, higher than the 4.4% global average [12]

The COVID-19 pandemic

Between 20 and 30 March 2020, almost half (49.6%) of people reported high anxiety and average anxiety scores of 5.2 out of 10, a marked increase from 3 in the last quarter of 2019 [13]
For someone who reported that they 'often or always' felt lonely, the odds of reporting high anxiety (scoring between 6 and 10 out of 10) were almost 5 (4.7) times greater than those for someone who 'never' felt lonely [13]
The percentage of people who are married or in a civil partnership that reported high levels of anxiety significantly increased since the last quarter of 2019; 39% up from 19% [13]
Of the 822,000 workers suffering from work-related anxiety, depression or stress in 2020/21, an estimated 449,000 reported that this was caused or made worse by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic [14]

anxiety statistics infographic